Installing libxine-extracodecs will get you the most wide-spread codecs installed, but not all of them. MPlayer, a movie player program for Linux, has support for a big bunch of video and audio formats. Installing them in Linux ( Ubuntu / Fedora / SUSE ) should be as easy as sudo yum (or aptitude) install w32codecs but for some reason it says “No candidate version found for w32codecs.” So here’s 2 methods on how to install them manually:

Method 1:

1. Go to the MPlayer Download Page. Scroll down to the Binary Codec Packages section. From the table, select the download link corresponding to your architecture (x86 in my case) and the mirror closest to you. Click on the link to download the codec bundle.
2. Unpack the essential-XXXXXXXX.tar.bz2 file you have downloaded and copy the contents to /usr/lib/win32/ (You may need to create the directory first)

Method 2:

$ wget http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-20071007.tar.bz2
$ tar -jxf all-20071007.tar.bz2
$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/codecs
$ sudo cp all-20071007/* /usr/local/lib/codecs
$ sudo ln -sf /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/lib/codecs
$ sudo ln -sf /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/local/lib/win32
$ sudo ln -sf /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/lib/win32
$ rm -rf all-20071007

Now MPlayer can play about anything on Earth, as long as it’s not DRM’ed.

Filed under: howto, linux, micro$oft